MOTO GP

Bagnaia world champion

The Italian Pecco Bagnaia has been proclaimed the 2022 MotoGP world champion in the last round of the season: the Valencian Community Grand Prix held at the Circuit Ricardo Tormo. At 25 years old, he gets his second world title after the one he won in Moto2 in 2018 and he does it after overcoming a 91-point deficit, something that no one had done before.

A title that ends two long droughts: that of Italian motorcycling in the premier class, 13 years after Valentino Rossi's last title in 2009; and two more years (15) of Ducati, which thus achieved its second drivers' title after that of the Australian Casey Stoner in 2007.

His start to the course was, to put it mildly, understated. He started badly, falling in Qatar and taking Jorge Martín in a race won surprisingly by Enea Bastianini; and he did not improve the situation much in Indonesia either, where he barely added a point by being 15th with victory by Miguel Oliveira.

He ended the double American event with two fifth places: first in Argentina, where Aleix Espargaró made his debut; and later in Americas, again with Bastianini at the top of the drawer. He did not improve in Portugal, and to top it off, the victory went to Fabio Quartararo, his great theoretical rival before the start of the course.

His first win of the year came in Spain, where he dominated from start to finish leading Quartararo on the wheel the entire race without leaving a single gap. He began a strange journey there where he ranged between 25 and zero points: after the fall in France when he was fighting with the eventual winner Bastianini, he returned to the top of the drawer before his audience in Italy.

Bad luck hit him in Catalunya, where he was shot down in the first corner by Nakagami while Quartararo was heading for another victory; Same result as in Germany: victory for the Frenchman and zero for the Italian, who crashed at the start of the race. That left him at 91 points in the general, a distance that seemed irretrievable at exactly half of the year.

From there, he began his impressive streak of winning with authority in the Netherlands, where the fall of the Yamaha rider allowed him to take a good bite of points in the general classification. So he went to the summer break and returned in the same way, achieving the fourth victory of the year in Great Britain after containing Maverick Viñales.

He did not fail in Austria, the Ducati fiefdom par excellence, also beating Quartararo himself to put a little more pressure before linking the fourth in a row in San Marino, beating Bastianini on his particular fetish route to begin to believe that the comeback was possible.

The streak was cut short in Aragón when he was beaten heads-up by Bastianini, but Quartararo's zero allowed him to cut 20 points in one fell swoop. Everything got complicated in Japan with the fall in the final stretch of the race won by Jack Miller, with Fabio eighth.

One week he turned everything around with two equal results: the two zeros of the 2021 champion allowed the Ducati rider to consummate the comeback with two third places, first in the rain in Thailand with another display from Oliveira; and then in Australia in the triumph of Álex Rins.

This allowed him, in one fell swoop, to become the leader of the general classification of the premier class for the first time in his life and to have his first title option in Malaysia, where he already certified his Moto2 title... but where he could not resolve that of MotoGP despite achieving his seventh victory of the year.

Quartararo did his homework finishing on the podium to postpone the outcome until Valencia, where a 14th place was enough for Bagnaia and he has not failed to place his name in the history of motorcycling by becoming the 2022 MotoGP world champion.

by SWINXY